Goals of Today’s Meeting

Reviewing the core messaging that @cguntur and @jillbinder wrote, and talking about moving the plan moving forward long term.

Core Message

We are choosing to focus for now on reaching out to meetup organizers to run this training at their local meetups.

The current version of the message for us to send out, with the call to action edited by @blogaid and @meher is:

Have you ever had trouble getting women to speak at your meetups and WordCamps?

We are looking for meet up organizers to run the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training workshop. It is a workshop to help more women want to speak. We will train you and provide the materials.

This workshop has been run in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Montreal. The combination of running this workshop and putting in other related efforts, these cities all had a significant increase in the number of WordCamp speakers who identify as women. In particular, Vancouver has had 50% for 3 years in a row, and this year Seattle had the highest so far, 60%.

Now we are bringing it to Meetups in other cities. We want to hear from you! Let us know if you’re interested in conducting this workshop for your local meetup or any hesitations you have. Please fill in this form.

Along with a form that has some required radio buttons for:

“I’m in”

“Not now” or “Later”

And a text box for “Anything else you want us to know?” for more open ended responses.

We would contact them a couple of days later.

@blogaid asked where this will be posted. @jillbinder will check with @andreamiddleton. She’s thinking probably using a google form, and doesn’t mind using her google account if that is appropriate. If not, Andrea will be able to tell us which account to use. Likely it will be posted on the community P2. Again, Jill will check with Andrea.

Long-Term Plan

Our long-term plan suggestions so far:

Reaching out to the meetup organisers from different places

WCUS Twitter

Possibly WCEU twitter

Writing articles (coordinate with marketing for their help)

Speaking about it in the Slack groups of countries

Speaking about it in Facebook groups

Speaking to people about it at WordCamps

People who are already doing Diversity work, ask for a mention in their talks or a tweet out to their followers

Leveraging the monthly or quarterly email newsletters to chapter meetup organizers that may be starting

Asking former workshop attendees to write articles about how attending the workshop affected them

@blogaid suggested: “Want to encourage more women speakers at your next WP MeetUp?” along with a link to an article that explains more. The article will include the form. She suggested that if we use Bitly, we can create the shortlink for the article, video, etc and have a better time tracking the spread of the word too, or even have a hashtag to track shares, such as #wpwomenspeaker or #wpwomenspeak.

@blogaid suggested that we activate everyone in our working group to post on their social media accounts when there is a new article, video, etc. We can post the tweet to #community-team for our team to use.

@blogaid belongs to about 40 industry related Facebook groups and says this would be appropriate to post in several of them.

@jillbinder suggested that we look at the long-term plan in the next meeting (second week of January) with the larger group. For starting in the new year, the first steps can be the easy-to-do items:

Contacting meetup organizers directly (If we have access to them. She’ll find out from @andreamiddleton)

Tweets out to WCUS and WCEU (@newyorkerlaura has access to WCUS and we can ask WCEU)

Writing to Slack and FB country-specific groups. Jill has access to Canada on Facebook and Vancouver on Slack. We can find out who else in our group (or anyone reading this meeting) has access to other places.

Other

The next meeting will be second week of January where we look at the plan as a group.

In January @jillbinder will also be holding the second part of the workshop training for those who took it either live with her or watched the recording after. It will be a half hour wrap-up of the work people did on their own after taking or watching the first module with her. Date and time tbd.

Community Deputy Program

Community Deputies are a team of people all over the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and generally keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Here are some useful links about the program: